ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes over 530,000 rental observations to develop a model for estimation of private rental values for any property type at small-area level across England. These data were organized into hectare cells on the basis of their unit postcodes and represented within a Geographical Information System, facilitating estimation of the impact of census and other socio-economic variables within a hedonic rent estimation framework. Socio-economic variables such as income, inflation, tax rate and unemployment for example are variables used to measure the demand side of the rental market and are more relevant at a national level for forecasting future trends. The chapter considers the analytic techniques employed and key results. It examines a problem not previously considered at the scale in the UK. The chapter presents an indicative model accounting for over 68 per cent of the variance in rents at hectare cell level across the whole of England.
